Television/Radio; Filming Beckett, For Education Or Excitement

By Caryn James

Published: September 15, 2002

IN the minds of most television viewers and moviegoers, the name Samuel Beckett comes with the unmistakable aura of homework. But all the energy, comedy and piercing sadness that make Beckett great are on display in ''Beckett on Film,'' a project that brings his 19 stage plays to the screen, translated into works of pure cinema by an amazing lineup of directors and actors.

Tonight PBS presents a 90-minute special, ''Stage on Screen: Beckett on Film'' (10 p.m., Channel 13; check local listings), which includes seven of the plays, including one of the project's most stunning. Jeremy Irons plays two roles, the identical Reader and Listener, in ''Ohio Impromptu,'' a hauntingly beautiful, elegiac 10-minute play more moving than its throwaway title suggests. (It was written for a 1981 symposium honoring Beckett at Ohio State University.) With flowing white hair and a black coat, Mr. Irons faces himself at a long table. The Reader begins reading from a book, a tale of the Listener's lost and perhaps dead love. At times the silent Listener raps on the table, as if he can bear no more, and the Reader pauses, only to pick up the tale again. Mr. Irons, his face hollow, creates a timeless portrait of loss. As the Reader, the ghost of a memory, he does justice to Beckett's graceful words: ''Stay, where we were so long alone together. My shade will comfort you.'' The Listener responds with expressions of excruciating sorrow.

Charles Sturridge, who directed Mr. Irons in ''Brideshead Revisited,'' has enhanced the effect by shooting ''Ohio Impromptu'' in black and white. And as he argues in the commentary on the DVD, film allows him to fulfill Beckett's intentions better than theater, where the stage directions call for the Reader and the Listener to resemble one another as much as possible to suggest they are the same person. Here they really are.

Unfortunately, the rest of the special does have a Beckett 101 air about it. Mr. Irons, also the show's host, introduces the other works (including ''Catastrophe,'' in which David Mamet directs Harold Pinter and John Gielgud, and ''Play,'' with Anthony Minghella directing Kristen Scott-Thomas and Alan Rickman). But his narration also lays out Beckett's Big Themes, exactly the way to deaden the viewer's experience. And none of the other works in this television special is as successfully transformed to screen as ''Ohio Impromptu.''

You have to go to the complete project on DVD (Ambrose Video, $149.95) for other gems. In ''Endgame,'' the great Michael Gambon gives a fierce yet restrained performance as the blind, chair-bound Hamm, reflecting on a life that might have been meaningless. All lives threaten to be meaningless in Beckett's world, yet these film adaptations capture how furiously he resisted that threat.